The Acer Aspire S7 was one of the hottest high end Ultrabooks to hit the market in 2012. The 13.3" model featured a white Gorilla Glass 2 lid, an extremely thin design and stunning good looks. Its Achilles heel was battery life, which was woefully short. Somehow Acer managed to significantly increase battery capacity without increasing weight, and this 2.87 lbs. machine now runs for 6 hours on a charge. Of course, the latest Intel Haswell CPUs with their power savings help too.

The Aspire S7 is as ever a premium Ultrabook, and you're paying extra for the unique glass and aluminum design and crazy light weight. That said, our Core i5-4200U model with 8 gigs of RAM and a 128 gig SSD lists for $1,499, making it more expensive than the MacBook Air 13" and the Sony Vaio Pro 13... and Sony and Apple aren't known for their low prices. The Core i7-4500U model with a 256 gig SSD lists for $1,699. Yes, there's a good chance you'll find these for $50 to $100 less than list price, shaving some of the pain off the purchase.

Like the last gen Aspire S7, the SSD is configured in RAID0 for improved speed, and our 128 gig SSD's speed matched and sometimes modestly exceeded the PCIe SSD in the Sony Vaio Pro 13. We're also thrilled that Acer went with 8 gigs of RAM on this machine, since memory is soldered to the motherboard and you won't be able to upgrade it later. Even if you never exceed 4 gigs of RAM, it's nice to know it's there for the future. The S7 has a full HD IPS touchscreen, dual band WiFi with WiDi and Bluetooth. The design is largely unchanged from its predecessor except the keyboard travel has increased .3mm and the power button is now beside the charging port.

With the second gen Aspire S7, there's only a 13.3" model, the 11.6" is no longer an option.